Pete's art dump
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One of my favorite modern art pieces called One and Three Chairs addresses similar issues and concepts that Treachery does. One of my favorite analyses of visual iconography and whatnot is in chapter 2 of “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud. He actually starts the chapter with a brief quip about Treachery of Images and expands from there. The whole book is amazing, but chapter 2 was really stand-out in discussing this topic. (As an aside, if you care about narrative theory or visual conveyance of information in the slightest Understanding Comics is an absolute must-read, even if you don’t care about comics specifically).

And regarding the earlier conversation, I actually went on vacation and wasn’t around to check the thread. I’ll reply once I get some time to read and process your post, pete.

One of the interesting things about Kosuth’s chair installation is that the only substantive piece of art is the enlarged text definition of “chair.” The actual chair and the photograph of the chair are supplied by the museum or gallery. This, to me, suggests even another fascinating layer of the piece. The art, in this case, is the idea, not the object. In some ways it’s like performance art… but performance art is an experience. This is not exactly an experience. It’s almost like a very short book. The value of a book isn’t in its form, but in its content.

Borofsky sort of hinted at the stangeness of art by numbering all of his pieces sequentially. While this may seem like a simple way of indexing and cataloging his artistic product, it breaks down when he would do performances that consisted of sitting in a chair with a pad of paper and writing the next number in his sequence, pulling the top sheet off, then writing the next number. And so on. A person could conceivably pick up one of these pieces of paper with a long number scribbled on it and have an original Borofsky. Trippy. Thought-provoking. Utter bullshit? I don’t know.

Yeah, rawismojo, McCloud’s book is fantastic. Totally ground-breaking, erudite, genius. It’s one of those books I’ve bought for people. (Along with The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, Elements of Typographic Style, and The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.) However, for as much as I love what he’s contributed to the dialog of narrative art, I haven’t read any of his other books.

A lot of artists have touched on this idea, and they always stood out to me. The one that always stood out to me a lot was Sol LeWitt’s stuff. He basically painted directly onto walls, wrote down specific instructions on how to re-create the painting, and then museums pass the instructions around and paint directly onto walls in exhibition halls, so the art is literally created and destroyed hundreds or thousands of times. His wall paintings themselves were never extraordinarily captivating to me, but the concept is pretty interesting. Daniel Buren also did some sort of similar things that were similarly interesting.

Regarding McCloud, his other books in the series aren’t near as revolutionary as Understanding. They’re good, and if you’re interested in making comic books I’d 100% recommend them. If you’re not into making comics, there’s no compelling reason to read them, unlike Understanding. As for his actual comic books, they’re alright but nothing too amazing.

Art form and function are interesting places for artists to explore. It’s probably the thing I love most about graffiti. Name any other art form where the artist endures considerable personal expense, and physical and legal risk in order to produce their work. In the documentary (that I think is terrific), Bomb It, one artist says, “I didn’t ask to see a picture of your model in underwear next to the logo for your cologne, and you didn’t ask to see my art… so we’re even.”

Regardless of the quality of the graffiti, the meta-message is awesome. Art should incite a reaction, an opinion, and (therefore) be interactive. If that art transcends a frame, is disposable, is socially repulsive, or just broadly confusing, is not really the point… the point is that it exists and is defined as something to incite an intellectual or emotional reaction. (Wait, does that make marketing art because it incites a person to emotionally bond with the product, or intellectually decide to purchase it?)

For a few weeks I’d warm up my morning by creating a quick animal caricature. I’d give myself 2 hours before I I had to move on to real work. Here’s a quick breakdown of the steps taken to create this image:

With a reasonably large canvas size in Illustrator, begin with the major contours. You’ll use a LOT of the Pathfinder functions… exclude, subtract front, an combine, especially. You can see in the screen shot below that process mid-way. I’m not worried about color yet. I’m just establishing shapes and the major value divisions of shadow and light. Nearby I have primary and secondary photo reference. The primary reference is basically the photograph that I’m drawing or tracing, and the secondary reference shows aspects of the subject that I might consider while improving the drawing.

This the shot below, some shapes have been “pathfindered” into place while others have not. I’m using a red stroke because it’s easy to see.

Now I have my main shapes in reasonable shape. I’m happy with the structure, composition, and relative degree of detail. (There’s only one small area in the ear that needs to be resolved.)

Now I can start playing with color. I settled on a palette that seemed dry and a bit chalky, like dried mud. Some detail in the legs was added after seeing how the values were balancing out. This is important: I’ve retained the outer contour. It’s still red, you can see it peeking out. I’m not entirely happy with the uniformity and line weight of the forward ear, but I can work on that later.

I’ve given the entire subject a frame and added some grass to help distract from the line weights around the ears. (I never got around to resolving those in the final… I just let it go.) The overall values and gradation are reasonable.

Remember that outer contour? I opted to stroke it with a fat dark line to hold the whole thing together and give the subject presence. It’s a gimmick, but it works and can turn a shitty drawing into an okay one. At first I liked it a lot, then I felt like it was too much. Also, there’s small unresolved lines and things that need help.

Finally, below, I pulled back quite a bit on the stroke. I gave the ear a slight deviation to give it life. (I never resolved the back ear.)

I had, as I said, a self-imposed time constraint… so refinements needed to be selective. Every decision, when you’re working “under deadline,” must undergo a quick cost-benefit analysis. “What changes do I have time to make that will yield the greatest improvement?” Professional graphic designers are painfully familiar with this question.

The color palette was culled from Kuler. It’s a terrific color site. Each palette provides up to 5 colors as swatches that can be imported directly into Adobe products. The palettes offered can be viewed by date, popularity, and so on. Sometimes you can find palettes for specific projects… like “McDonald’s Menu” or whatnot. It’s fun. And it’s sure faster than identifying colors from scratch.

I’ve spoken at a number of art schools and colleges around the country. I usually create a new presentation for each talk. In Akron, Ohio, I concluded with this slide… one that I fully believe in. I thought you guys might enjoy it.

Here’s my sketchpad. It’s basically a roll of drop-cloth paper from Home Depot hanging from the ceiling by a string, like toilet paper.

I like this paper because it’s thick, toothy, and takes marker and chalk well. It’s about $15 for a massive roll that seems to last forever. I usually cut off the bottom when I’m tired of working on that drawing but in this case I have some stuff penciled in that I want to finish inking, so I haven’t cut it. (I’ll roll it back up into position to ink it, then cut it.)

Drawing large changes my approach quite a bit. It’s more dramatic, but also more challenging, than drawing on a traditional pad.

The tricky part with this drawing was weathering the paper. The butcher paper comes on a long roll. After doing the drawing, I cut the sheet off. I filled a bucket with warm water and a few squirts of black ink, then wadded up the entire drawing and dunked it. (That was the scary part.)

Now, with it soaking wet and wadded up in a tight ball, I unfurled it, wadded it again differently and repeated the process. Then I wrung it out and laid it out to dry a little bit on my studio floor.

When it was halfway dry, I gently rubbed sand on it. This broke up the fibers and made it slightly “fuzzy.” It also helped wear out the Sharpie ink a little bit so it wasn’t so crisp.

Finally, I worked on the edges a little by tearing them down into the drawing so it looked like this was part of a much larger illustration.

Last, I laid it out in the driveway and let the sun dry it completely.

I added some more inner scrumbles to the beard to help form it shortly after I took this photo, but it’s done (enough). When you say “plane of the face” do you mean, like, the face didn’t really pop out for you?

Yep, that’s exactly what I mean.
I sat there staring at it for a little while going “I know this is a portrait…… So why aren’t the shapes making sense?” before I saw it.
I don’t know it it’s due to there being too much negative space, or me being too sleep deprived at the time. Apologies if it was the latter.

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